that men have made in his name, would it not blast his soul with horror?  Would he not go mad at the sight of it, he the Prince of Mercy and Love!  That dreadful night when he lay in the Garden of Gethsemane and writhed in agony until he sweat blood—­do you think that he saw anything worse than he might see tonight upon the plains of Manchuria, where men march out with a jeweled image of him before them, to do wholesale murder for the benefit of foul monsters of sensuality and cruelty?  Do you not know that if he were in St. Petersburg now, he would take the whip with which he drove out the bankers from his temple—­”

Here the speaker paused an instant for breath.  “No, comrade,” said the other, dryly, “for he was a practical man.  He would take pretty little imitation lemons, such as are now being shipped into Russia, handy for carrying in the pockets, and strong enough to blow a whole temple out of sight.”

Lucas waited until the company had stopped laughing over this; then he began again:  “But look at it from the point of view of practical politics, comrade.  Here is an historical figure whom all men reverence and love, whom some regard as divine; and who was one of us—­who lived our life, and taught our doctrine.  And now shall we leave him in the hands of his enemies—­shall we allow them to stifle and stultify his example?  We have his words, which no one can deny; and shall we not quote them to the people, and prove to them what he was, and what he taught, and what he did?  No, no, a thousand times no!—­we shall use his authority to turn out the knaves and sluggards from his ministry, and we shall yet rouse the people to action!—­”

Lucas halted again; and the other stretched out his hand to a paper on the table.  “Here, comrade,” he said, with a laugh, “here is a place for you to begin.  A bishop whose wife has just been robbed of fifty thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds!  And a most unctuous and oily of bishops!  An eminent and scholarly bishop!  A philanthropist and friend of labor bishop—­a Civic Federation decoy duck for the chloroforming of the wage-working-man!”

To this little passage of arms the rest of the company sat as spectators.  But now Mr. Maynard, the editor, took occasion to remark, somewhat naively, that he had always understood that Socialists had a cut-and-dried program for the future of civilization; whereas here were two active members of the party, who, from what he could make out, were agreed about nothing at all.  Would the two, for his enlightenment, try to ascertain just what they had in common, and why they belonged to the same party?  This resulted, after much debating, in the formulating of two carefully worded propositions:  First, that a Socialist believes in the common ownership and democratic management of the means of producing the necessities of life; and, second, that a Socialist believes that the means by which this is to be brought about is the class conscious